Getting tough on spam

Spam is a curse, and the situation is worsening. On an annual basis, junk email costs US businesses $8.9bn (£5.6bn). It costs European businesses $2.5bn (£1.6bn).

Plus there's another $500m (£312m) for US and European internet service providers. This is according to a study published by Ferris Research in December 2002.

The problem is worse in the US and tends to affect business people more than consumers. But before too long, the flood of spam will reach everybody with an email account.

Brightmail, a company that creates anti-spam software, has said that spam accounted for 40 per cent of all email in November 2002, up from 13 per cent a year earlier.

IDC estimates that 31 billion emails were sent every day in 2001. It predicts that by the end of this year, that total will have risen to 60 billion.

And, by July 2003 there will be more spam sent than legitimate email, according to email managed service provider MessageLabs.

And spam doesn't only come by email. "No sooner have the latest photo-messaging mobile phones been unwrapped at Christmas than experts are warning that they could become the latest method of bombarding us with spam," reported The Guardian last month.

A poll from Harris Interactive, published in December 2002, found that nearly 75 per cent of email users support making spam illegal.

In a number of US states it already is, and there's movement to make it illegal at a federal level. However, legislation is complex and slow.

Defining spam exactly is not always straightforward. Some spammers claim that their rights to free speech are denied by anti-spam laws.

Others are hard to track down. They move around and launch their spam from countries with lax legal systems.

At corporate level, there are a number of companies that provide anti-spam services. These can work reasonably well, but they must evolve constantly, because spammers are forever trying new tricks.

If you're looking for a corporate solution, make sure you go with a company that has the resources and reputation to keep upgrading its service. But for the individual consumer, the choice isn't that great, if my experience is anything to go by.

Over the past couple of months, I've tried lots of anti-spam software. Invariably, I found that I was spending more time using the software than it would take me to use my delete key.

For example, I tried Spamkiller from McAfee, a leading antivirus software provider. To be honest, I found it slow. It did stop a lot of spam, but it also stopped a lot of my legitimate email.

I've tried lots of other stuff as well, but the results have also been poor. I'm about to try Mailshell, which has been getting some very good reviews.

Anti-spam software and services have a number of basic approaches. They can use filters that scan for words and phrases commonly used by spammers, or they can draw on blacklists of known spammers.

Some software works by getting the person who sends you an email to go through a one-off registration process that can only be completed by a human. (This approach is based on the assumption that most spam is automatically sent by mass mailer software.)

Some services work by downloading your mail to servers and filtering it there. Then you only download the spam-free stuff. In other situations, you download software that checks your email before you download it.

Invariably, some spam gets through and, worse still, some legitimate email is blocked.

"It's an arms race," said Steve Linford, director of the London-based SpamHaus Project, a non-profit organisation that posts information about the groups behind unsolicited email. "The more we lock spammers down, the more techniques they try."

If you want to check out anti-spam software the best place I found was Download.com. Place the words 'anti-spam' in the search box and you will get a long list. Make sure you read the user opinions before you download anything

If you're on the internet, you can't avoid spam. However, you can do some things to stop being totally overloaded by it. Here are some tips.

Take care of your email address
If there's an email address you want to keep long-term, be very careful how you use it.

Set up a more temporary email account (Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.). Use that address when subscribing to things, sending e-cards, joining in discussion lists and so on.

Try and mask your email address when you publish it on a website
Spammers have software that goes around the web harvesting email addresses, so use a script to publish your address. Another option is to use forms for email contact.

If you're contributing to public email lists or discussion forums, add something to your email address to thwart the automatic harvesters. For example, use: 'johnNOSPAM@xyz.com'.

Report the spammer to their service provider
This is not as simple as it seems, as spammers use all sort of tricks to hide their identities. For useful information on how to report spam, check out spam.abuse.net.

Be very careful about replying to spam
Many spam emails claim to give you the opportunity to unsubscribe. On most of them, this is a trick. If you try to unsubscribe, they will then know that yours is a 'live' email address and will send you even more spam.

Another useful resource is the Coalition Against Unsolicited Email at www.cauce.org.

For information on the state of legislation globally in relation to spam, check out www.spamlaws.com.

Gerry McGovern is an author and consultant. He has recently published Content Critical and The Web Content Style Guide (FT Prentice Hall).

See also:

United we stand, disunited we're spammed

Until countries band together to create international law, the problem of spam will continue to grow  28 Jul 2003

Junk mail

The term 'spam' may have been popularised by a Monty Python sketch but, in the electronic world, junk mail is far from a laughing matter.  06 Jun 2003

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